The Namib is a coastal desert in Southern Africa. The name Namib is of Khoekhoegowab origin and means "vast place".

With its red dunes rolling endlessly into the ocean, the Namib is the oldest desert in the world — a sea of silica stretching along Namibia‘s entire Atlantic coast. Having endured arid or semi-arid conditions for roughly 55–80 million years, the Namib is the oldest desert in the world and contains some of the world's driest regions, with only western South America's Atacama Desert to challenge it for age and aridity benchmarks.

The Namib Desert is one of the 500 distinct physiographic provinces of the South African Platform physiographic division. It occupies an area of around 80,950 square kilometres, stretching from the Uniab River (north) to the town of Lüderitz (south) and from the Atlantic Ocean (west) to the Namib Escarpment (east). It is about 1,600 km long from north to south and its east–west width varies from 50 to 160 kilometres. To the north, the desert leads into the Kaokoveld; the dividing line between these two regions is roughly at the latitude of the city of Walvis Bay, and it consists in a narrow strip of land (about 50 km wide) that is the driest place in Southern Africa.

Despite its emptiness, the desert scenery of the Namib has a stark beauty that instantly captivates the imagination. Made up of more than 6.5 million hectares of rolling dunes and gravels plains, the Namib is full of contrasts, but none are so startling as the shimmering white pans set against the vivid orange dunes at Sossusvlei. Lying along the dramatic coastline of the driest country south of the Sahara, the dune sea creates a sense of space and solitude that is unlike anywhere else on Earth.

According to nationalgeographic/ wikipedia